The economy of the ad industry has traditionally been based on media. Media was where the bulk of an advertiser's budget went, so media floated the economy. Impressions were bought and sold with little regard as to whether the viewing of the commercial was ever consummated. Like it or not, we had little choice. An impression was as granular as our measurement methods could get. Digital is changing all of that -- along with the economics of video advertising. While media will still be where the bulk of an advertiser's budget will go, a new currency is starting to come ...

Google rocked the online world last November when it announced that the company had brokered a deal to purchase YouTube, the upstart that had become the go-to site for video on the Web. The most exciting part of this acquisition was the blank slate being acquired. YouTube -- a Google company -- had the opportunity to take a leadership role and bring online video to the forefront of the advertising business. But the months have passed with no major announcements.

The rumors of the demise of television advertising and the 30-second spot have been greatly exaggerated. The prevailing fear of the complete transition of television content to the Internet -- and the horrible impact this will have on television advertising -- is just plain wrong. On the contrary, new technological solutions and the digital deadline are going to double television advertising dollars.

As broadband video content continues stretching its legs from information to entertainment to advertising to education and beyond, one of the key questions that's being debated is how to best integrate video into the conventions and best practices of the online user experience. Scores of books have been written on the topic. But even within those recent editions that have been purportedly "updated" from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, there hasn't really been a definitive point of view on how to best integrate the video experience/platform as a part of the whole, or, for that matter, when it is the ...

There are millions of videos being streamed each day, so is it any wonder that so much recent press has revolved around video ads -- pre-rolls, post-rolls, interstitials, etc.? After all, someone has to pay for this limitless entertainment afforded by the YouTubes of the world. It seems a simple leap of logic that video ads ought to be the mechanism to do so. However, in the midst of all this attention for video, it appears that the vast opportunities afforded by rich media have taken a back seat. And it doesn't seem there's any good reason why.

When the Online Publishers Association published its initial findings from a survey on the effective use of pre-roll video advertising, I thought it warranted further discussion. Overall, I would suspect that the findings are not surprising to most of us -- except, of course, for findings that state that there was a better response to 30-second ads than to 15-second ads.

Did you ever notice how slick the pre-rolls are that precede today's "most popular" Web videos? In most cases, they're actually :15 cutdowns of $300,000+ commercials made for television. But what happens when your spot looks too slick for the content it's pre-rolling? Does it hurt your brand more than help it?

In the late '90s, the music industry fell victim to rampant P2P file-sharing applications that made copying and sharing music a fairly common practice. One could consider this development but the first shockwave of the digital era -- or perhaps it was simply an inevitable next step in a new not-so-obvious and not-so-welcome change in the fundamental business paradigm.